Tag: distributed learning

I had meant to take a break from #rhizo15 but instead found myself taking a coffee break that brought me right back.

Over coffee, at the end of a year’s teaching (my first full academic year in the job), myself and a colleague got to reflecting on how the year had gone and how we might develop things next year. In the back of my mind was the article by @sbayne that I think was put out there by@NomadWarMachine (not @davecormier) and the task he proposed for #rhizo15 this week.

So, I don’t know to what extent this musing is a detailing of my ‘subjective’:

How do we design our own or others learning when we don’t know where we are going? How does that free us up? What can we get done with subjectives that can’t be done with objectives?

or a working out of ideas partly inspired by Sian’s article.

During the coffee chat it became clear that while happy with the main course I oversee (for me still new, to my colleague now possible tired), having made various changes to emphasise the challenges I wanted participants to engage with rather than just go through content (the content instead working as a vehicle for engaging with concepts and problems), I felt a desire to push explore the possibility of creating more open/connected/distributed forms of learning.

My recent engagement with digital scholarship and #connectedlearning has propelled me to consider other options, and to think about how I might hack my own course, hybridise it.

The stimulats, very much driven my the discussions in #tjc15 and #rhizo15, are:

think of resources rather than content: while remaining with the striated texture of the current course (a pre-defined syllabus and form of assessment) how might we reconfigure these so that they are more like initial sets of resources organised around difficult ideas that we face as university educators? How do we communicate that intent and encourage a mode of engagement with them that is more akin to ‘hacking’ than consumption?

can aspects of the syllabus be participant driven? one idea that occurred to me as we talked was of playing with the current timetabling in order to facilitate more participant engagement and potential to generate participant relevant content. Folks did find useful the clear signposting (and if you read my #rhizo15 story previously you know how attached I am to signposting) of key texts/resources that were organised around difficult or challenging ideas. Rather than being tied to the fortnightly 3 hour workshop (at the end of busy days) why not have the participants work in cross-disciplinary groups (like action learning sets) to work on the key texts and find their own texts, all the time focusing on the critical questions for practice this reading produces (semester 1 is more theory focused while semester 2 is more practice focused); and have shorter workshops that model many of the ideas we promote. I think this is about pushing my interest in practice theory further to see how it can reconfigure the current approach. It is also about playing with the potential for learning to come out of the connections folks make within the course.

making emergent objectives explicit: while we will have learning objectives, the reality is that folks operate with their own emergent objectives. They are motivated differently to participate in the course, this motivation often changing over time, and in relation to different aspects of the course. I make the assumption that they are all strategic learners. So why not make emergent objectives an explicit structure within the course? This would be transient, and would help them see their own students differently, more positively. Emergent objectives could become points for reflecting on what the course should be dealing with, what the difficult ideas and issues are, and therefore the content required.

disrupting my role as obligatory point of passage: and how can I dislodge myself as the obligatory point of passage, the ultimate point of authority? I have tried to break this down a little already by sharing with them my own critical reflections on the course (see here and here for examples). But by constraining the power to archive materials in the institutional VLE a clear hierarchy is established. I will not pretend that I am removing the hierarchy since I am after all a final arbiter, the one who, institutionally, is responsible for assessment – this Sian Bayne’s struggle to institute smooth spaces within striated institutions. But this can be disrupted by distributing the curating role across as many participants as possible through the use of social bookmarking to share resources (as well as the VLE). Also, could we introduce aspects of peer review?

What have I done here? I think I have, in the doing of this post, identified an emergent objective – that is the way my participation in #rhizo15 can feed back into my thinking about my own practice as an educator; working with the play of smooth and striated space.

But also, it is subjective in that it speaks to how I want to constitute my self as practitioner – what kind of educator can I be?

Like this:

I have just watched avideo of @davecormierwhere he uses the metaphor of the ‘weed’ as an alternative to the dominant, normative models of curriculum.

In the normative idea of curriculum, curricula ideas (a mix of ontology and epistemology) are reduced to content (syllabus), and learning construed as a linear path from ignorant to knowledgeable, where the teacher is the one who knows.

This normative idea is reinforced through the technology of the Learning Objective. Having just taught a class on LOs and got the participants to re-work their courses in light of this I fell upon a different idea, that of Emergent Outcomes. Now, I know why Biggs has developed the idea of learning objectives – its intent was to design in equity and not let teachers privilege those who already ‘get it’ and neglect those who don’t.

But it all too readily becomes a closed circuit – as many participants in my class argued.

And that’s when I came across emergent outcomes. Emergent outcomes are conducive, I feel, to the connectivist approach and rhizomatic learning in that knowledge and learning are seen to emerge from the context of learning or practice. As is becoming clear to me from exchanges with folks who were on #rhizo14 learning objectives are multiple, located (initially) in each individual (and we know from experience that despite setting LOs for our courses all students will have their own and develop new ones as they go through).

So, as I slowly lean in towards #rhizo15 my objectives are loose.

I have a recent experience that taught me to be open and resist the desire to place too much apparent order on events. For a moment, during the recent #TJC15 (Twitter Journal Club) my attention was taken away from the buzz of tweets. On turning back towards the dashboard I realised that I was ‘lost’. But lost implied that perhaps I SHOULD have control. But, following Jacque Ranciere, what if I simply enacted openness, rhizomatic thinking, and waited to see what happened?

I stepped back, I waited, and a cluster of words rose up to capture my attention.

Recently I had the pleasure of observing a pharmacology lab practical. As a neophyte academic developer I felt that it was important to familiarise myself with what ‘teaching’ meant in different disciplines, and so not rely solely on my own disciplinary perspective and theory. And this is where pharmacology comes in.

My own academic background is in education, and more specifically the sociology of education, and in recent years in the study of higher education. Although my move into academic development is requiring a re-forming of my structure of knowledge and practice, I am still operating in familiar landscapes. Recognising that many of my colleagues who participate in our courses do not approach this domain with familiarity – of concepts, language, genre of writing, etc., I wanted to put myself in situations where I had to struggle to become familiar.

And so, I found myself in a crowded chemistry laboratory, a guest of the pharmacology department.

As I stood there observing the activity I found myself making mental notes that related to two sets of literature that I had been engaging with – practice theory & posthumanism. I have written previously about my interest in practice theory and how this could inform academic development. So I was intrigued about how knowledge and learning was embedded in and across the varied practices the students were engaged in, and how this worked against a view of learning that placed undue attention on the purely cognitive. Simultaneously I was taken with the ‘dance of agency‘ between students and the non-human – the way we might understand how ‘doing’ science may be ‘unthinkable’ without also considering the active role of the apparatus the students engaged with and the chemical compounds they relied upon in the lab activity. That is, the way the students’ knowing and learning was essentially mediated by and entangled with apparatus, technology and chemical compounds.

As I observed the way pairs of students sought to align each other and align themselves with the apparatus, technology and chemicals, an idea slowly emerged. And this idea is taking the form of some ‘continuous publishing‘ whereby I will use this blog to develop and rehearse my thinking with the intention of writing an article over the coming weeks.

I begin by sharing with you some initial notes from my research journal.

Snippet 1:

My approach in this paper is ‘posthumanist’ and ’emergent’ in orientation. As such it differs in emphasis to more traditional, humanist accounts of learning in higher education. It touches directly on constructivist theories of learning which are distinctly humanist. As I will argue, my approach does not discount the importance of human agency in the learning process, but it does displace such agency as the final point of analytical reference. Instead, I extend constructivist understandings so that we consider the way human actors, processes, concepts, and non-human materials are intimately related. I argue that understanding, knowing and learning are effects of this entanglement of human, discursive and non-human. In doing this I am deeply influenced by the practice turn in social theory, especially the idea of knowledge as embedded in practice. Consequently, learning is viewed performatively, as an emergent quality, as something that emerges from practice and is not exterior to it.

Snippet 2:

Over the coming days I attempt to clarify my understanding of the two main literatures of posthumanism (as related to science and learning) and practice theory. The entries will, of necessity, be disjointed, provisional, EMERGENT.

Like this:

The other day I took part in my first ‘Twitter Journal Club’ (#TJC15) facilitated by Laura Gogia from Virginia Commonwealth University’s AltLab. The experience was exciting, disruptive, thoughtful. Lots of things. You can see the various streams here.

This TJC event occurred at a moment when I am re-thinking my sense of being an academic. Indeed, the term academic sometimes feels awkward, especially, as Pat Thomson forcefully notes, at a time when scholarship as inquiry is increasingly being forged into the language of ‘brand’, and particularly the way academic CVs are ‘managed’ so that they contribute more directly to the (business) strategy of our institutions. Like Pat I am about to work with a group of colleagues on developing research career strategies. She asserts that she is not a BRAND and in doing so is working against the current flow in higher education. Let Pat talk for herself:

Brand, narrative, what’s the difference really? Yet it still feels that the idea of a narrative is not the same as the idea of a brand. The terms come from somewhere different, and that matters. A narrative doesn’t emanate from a market even if it’s been put to work in one. And a narrative is perhaps not simply a one-thing, but is able to hold together in some tension different aspects of an academic life. It’s not homogenous. It doesn’t represent a singular product or self, if you like. And maybe the idea of narrative opens up more room for the interpreter too – the listener or reader who makes their own mind up about what a narrative means. Maybe a reader is a bit different from being a customer who buys something – or not. Maybe the interpreter is a role description which encompasses broader social and institutional politics and personal idiosyncracies.

Let me step back to the Twitter Journal Club for a moment.

In this space we co-created, we engaged in practices that were not bounded by the culture of ‘managed CVs’. Yet, the practice was scholarly. Indeed PRACTICE is the key term here, both in relation to the content of the paper we were discussing (such an interesting verb when used in relation to Twitter) and the activity we were engaged in.

Journal Clubs are part of ‘normal’ academic business, particularly within certain disciplines in the sciences. One key rationale for such an activity is to bring doctoral students and faculty together around a number of central academic functions such as:

keep up to date with research within the discipline/field of study

assess students’ competencies in key academic skills

create a sense of belonging to a scholarly community within the institution and with a wider scholarly community.

But there was something refreshingly NOT NORMAL about our venture in the twittersphere.

Talking to some colleagues about how journal clubs are used in their disciplines/departments one theme often emerges – that it confronts students with the ‘reality’ of scholarly practice, of the “cut and thrust” of debate, of having to “defend oneself”. Admittedly some colleagues refer to this culture as one that is not conducive to producing the kind of graduate attributes that they value, especially notions of openness and sharing of work. Others, though, see it as a necessary part of the socialisation of students into ‘normal’ scholarly practice.

So let me focus a little bit more on PRACTICE in this context.

There is an interesting strand within scholarly reflections on PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION that are framed by sociocultural perspectives. Again, it is best to let folks speak for themselves on this, then I will add my own spin on it:

It avoids treating material things as mere appendages to human intention and design, or as traces of human culture. Among perspectives that seem to be part of this pervasive shift, the material world is treated as continuous with and in fact embedded in the immaterial and the human. Therefore in this discus- sion, the term ‘sociomaterial’ is used to represent perspectives that are argued to form part of this shift.

The idea of practice as the site of knowing questions the prevailing over-rationalist view of knowing in organisations by undercutting the idea that “individual subjects [are] the source of meaning and normativity” (Schatzki 2001, p. 12)…..Moreover, the inherent focus on knowing as a collective and heterogeneous endeavour establishes interesting connections between the site-based view and other approaches that understand cognition as a distributed phenomenon

What I take from these discussions is the idea of LEARNING as embedded and distributed in and across a wide array of practices, and that knowledge is accomplished or enacted in the contexts of practice rather than as something we transmit from our brains to our eyes, mouths and fingers through language – such as reading an academic article, writing notes, and speaking to the paper in a journal club. Also, knowing, learning and practice are inherently collective endeavours. Knowing as a distributed phenomena is enacted with and through the material objects our human bodies are entangled in and with.

For me, there is something distinct about the way we were coming to KNOW in the context of practice that was the Twitter Journal Club compared to how I understand journal clubs to often run. Different kinds of knowing are constituted, different assemblages of practice cohering around the collective activities, different potential ‘selves’ enacted.

There was a beautiful symmetry in the enactments we were engaged in the other day and the content of the paper we discussed. The paper, ‘Teacher Experiences and Academic Identity: The Missing Components of MOOC Pedagogy‘ dealt with the troubled identifications of a team of scholars in the context of what they call a hybrid MOOC. In the paper they discuss the way they negotiated their presence in the MOOC environment; of experimenting ‘with an ethos of scale, and with a notion of the teacher as present, but radically outnumbered’ (62); of being caught between being positioned as the locus of authority and of being lost in a distributed network of knowledgeable participants. They became aware that the teacher did not suddenly become invisible simply because the educative activity was taken out of the classroom to digital space. Contrary to connectivist theories they saw that learning and knowledge did not simply arise out of the network, but was always and necessarily situated. All participants came with histories, philosophies, dispositions. The ‘network’ was a network in a particular space at a particular time, and involved a specific arrangement of concepts, theories, algorithms, terminology and material objects (that constitute the physical structure and organisation of the digital). The specific positionings of ‘teacher’ or ‘student’ could not be prefigured by a theory but were enacted in the practices of logging in, typing, reading, as well as the keyboards, screens, cables, etc. Our identities are performed and accomplished in the doings and sayings (including text) of the MOOC environment.

For the purpose of my discussion here, though, it is important that the paper discusses the way the practice of teaching was disrupted by the specific context of enactment – a hybrid-MOOC. While the teaching team approached the practical task of running the hybrid-MOOC on the basis of collective knowledge (the inherited knowledge of what to do in this kind of situation – know-how), the hybrid nature of the enterprise and their particular philosophical approach (which inserted them as visible if uncertain actors in the MOOC) disrupted the usual ‘ongoingness’ of their practice. Suddenly the know-how was not so un-thought; they had to think about what they were doing and why.

Similarly, our Twitter Journal Club was disruptive of the collective knowledge we brought to the event. We constituted new or revised practices in-situ, in the actual typing-reading-thinking-scratching- sitting-watching; in the computational power of the algorithms that make tweeting possible. Though each individual would bring different sets of experience of tweeting and ‘reviewing’ academic texts, we brought some collective knowledge of the core tasks. However, the situation was different enough to make the process of doing very evident. We were, I would suggest, making it up as we went along. Our ‘learning’ to DO the task (a Twitter Journal Club) was distributed across a range of concepts, physical actions, and material objects that were brought together in a relatively unique arrangement. And, of course, we will get better at it, because the more we DO it, the more certain tasks become un-thought, become part of the ongoing condition of accomplishing a Twitter Journal Club.

But what about LOVE?

Well, it just so happened that parallel to me engaging with the Twitter Journal Club I was reading a Hybrid Pedagogy article that spoke directly to the practices of ‘normal’ academic reviewing. This led to reading HP’s policy on Collaborative Peer Review. While some of the process, in particular making it up in-situ, was demanding, there was a real sense that all the participants CARED for each other. We weren’t dismantling the paper. Instead we mobilised it to generate discussion and lots of questions about PRACTICE. While we did not make it explicit, there was a sense in which we cared for the authors of the paper, we respected their endeavour and their invitation to think. It was a PEDAGOGICAL activity.

Just as in pedagogical spaces, where we learn through peering review and peer reviewing — peer review is an opportunity to learn and teach simultaneously. In this way we transform scholarship into pedagogy and pedagogy into a form of love.